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Monday, October 14, 2013

Health Care in America - "Corruption at the Core of the Collapse

The Broken American Health Care System

What is the driving force behind the failure of the most expensive heath care system in the world to provide a better quality of life?A lot of us have opinions.So do the media, politicians and academia, but none seem to be addressing the reason behind every failure of an institution like medical care in society.

There comes a point when the institutions no longer serve the purpose they were created to address.They evolve to a position where they believe the survival of the institution is more important than the mission of the institution.

When that happens, and inevitably it will when all good causes become their own bureaucracy, we have the seeds of corruption planted.

In America we spend about 9.9% of our disposable income on food.Thirty years ago we spent 15% of our disposable income, meaning we spend over 5% less today on food than thirty years ago.

Now compare that to our experience with health care costs.

An articlewas written June 28, 2009 by George Will titled: "Americans Will Regret Health Care Fix".It described the cost of health care in America as follows.

The Hudson Institute's Betsy McCaughey, writing in The American Spectator, says that in 1960 the average American household spent 53 percent of its disposable income on food, housing, energy and health care. Today the portion of income consumed by those four has barely changed -- 55 percent. But the health care component has increased while the other three combined have decreased. This is partly because as societies become richer, they spend more on health care -- and symphonies, universities, museums, etc.

It is also because health care is increasingly competent. When the first baby boomers, whose aging is driving health care spending, were born in 1946, many American hospitals' principal expense was clean linen. This was long before MRIs, CAT scans and the rest of the diagnostic and therapeutic arsenal that modern medicine deploys.

In a survey released in April by NPR, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard, only 6 percent of Americans said they were willing to spend more than $200 a month on health care, and the price must fall to $100 a month before a majority are willing to pay it. But according to Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute, Americans already are paying an average of $400 a month.

Most Americans do not know this because the cost of their care is hidden. Only 9 percent buy health coverage individually, and $84 of every $100 spent on health care is spent by someone (an employer, insurance company or government) other than recipients of the care. Those who get insurance as untaxed compensation from employers have no occasion to compute or confront the size of that benefit. But it is part of the price their employers pay for their work.

During the past thirty years health care as a percentage of our gross domestic product has grown by more than ten times.That does not include your taxes paid for the government expenditures on health care.The cost now is over $2.6 trillion a year and rising, both in terms of treatment and insurance.

Make no mistake, health care, long a public service through churches, non-profit organizations, government owned facilities and other resources, has now become BIG BUSINESS.

Pharmaceutical corporations led the way into making health care a profit center, not a public service, and now virtually every aspect of our health care system is privately owned, profit centered, and financed by Wall Street.

Wall Street may be reasonably good at financing new businesses like the Internet companies and health care industry but once Wall Street takes control of the industry through controlling the financing, that company serves a new master, Wall Street profitability.

Before you get out your protest banners and decide to occupy hospitals, I mean it is fashionable to protest against anyone we think is ripping off the public, look in the mirror because you are the one embracing a system now under the control of the financial institutions.

My point is this.Health care is more about serving Wall Street interests than the people's interest.Of course this is America and we encourage capitalism and these health care capitalists are operating within the framework of the law.I guess if you owned stock in enough health care companies you would be profiting from the gouging of the American public with excessive health care costs, but most of us don't own health care stocks.

Our health care industry has evolved to the point where moral and financial corruption permeate the entire system, even corrupting those in the industry who really want to help people.

The medical industry is dependent on funneling millions in campaign funds to politicians who have to vote on their funding, in bribing doctors to prescribe drugs, in bribing universities to compete on a cut throat basis for grants from private corporations for survival, and for encouraging doctors to own testing equipment which in turn has to be justified to keep.

Conflicts of interest and ethics issues dominate the health care landscape.It has become so financially competitive that excessive and unnecessary treatment is the order of the day as a simple and nearly undetectable way to pad the revenue stream.

Why X ray a single tooth if you can X ray the whole mouth?Why take one or two spinal X rays when you can take multiple X rays of the spine?Why not set up follow up doctor appointments for reasons of billing for the office visits rather than transmitting test results?

If a drug company pays a doctor to prescribe their drugs, and the more drugs prescribed the more the doctor makes, don't you think more prescriptions will be written?

How can FDA employees fairly evaluate a New Drug Application (NDA) worth potentially billions of dollars in new revenue if the same employees can quit their jobs and go to work for the same drug companies for far more money?

The top five drugs in terms of sales revenue in America all make between $3 and $5 billion a year for the owners, the pharmaceutical company.If new health research or treatment does not generate profits first and foremost, it is of little value to a profit driven health care system.

If congress or the president eliminated conflicts of interest in the industry, both in terms of the relationship between government workers and the industry and between the industry and practitioners, it would be a great start to cost reduction.

The same conflict of interest exists when doctors are convinced to own expensive equipment like CAT scan and MRI machines, blood laboratories, pharmaceutical offices and others.If Medicare or a health insurance company allows excessive CAT scans and MRI analysis for the purpose of making sure people are diagnosed and the doctors own the machines, don't you think more screens will be prescribed?

There are a thousand and one ways to get caught in a conflict in an industry that is barely regulated.Usually there are industry watchdogs like the Securities and Exchange Commission assigned to keep an eye on the system.However, even they are subject to the same conflicts because the SEC failed to see the housing and banking crisis coming.More than likely they just turned their back to it.

A comprehensive and fair conflict of interest law could be proposed by the president and approved by congress and a thorough ethics law could be adopted by the medical and health care industries and that would start to unscramble the layers of conflicts and ethics violations we face today.

Unfortunately, such leadership by our politicians and health industries is nonexistent and will be as long as the industry finances the political campaigns in Washington and through the nation.So we also need campaign financial reform, meaningful reform, to fix that inherent problem.

Fix the conflict of interest, draw up enforceable ethics laws, and clean up the campaign finance mess and it will lead directly to reduced health care costs.Once again, nothing has been proposed by politicians to correct this mess.